Delingpole: Environment Canada Airbrushes 100 Years of Inconvenient Climate Data out of History

Environment Canada – the federal environment agency in Canada – has erased a century’s worth of observed temperature data, claiming its modelled computer projections are more accurate.

According to Lorrie Goldstein of the Toronto Sun:

Canadians already suspicious of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax are likely be even more suspicious given a report by Ottawa-based Blacklock’s Reporter that Environment Canada omitted a century’s worth of observed weather data in developing its computer models on the impacts of climate change.

The scrapping of all observed weather data from 1850 to 1949 was necessary, a spokesman for Environment Canada told Blacklock’s Reporter, after researchers concluded that historically, there weren’t enough weather stations to create a reliable data set for that 100-year period.

“The historical data is not observed historical data,” the spokesman said. “It is modelled historical data … 24 models from historical simulations spanning 1950 to 2005 were used.”

This excuse is unlikely to persuade sceptical observers of the Climate Industrial Complex, which has consistently sought to play down, conceal or even destroy temperature data which does not fit in with the alarmist global warming narrative.

As Blacklock’s Reporter notes, in many cases the temperatures in the early 20th century were higher than they are today. This doesn’t suit the narrative – consistently pushed by green activists like Canada’s notoriously partisan Environment Minister Catherine ‘Climate Barbie’ McKenna – that the planet is warming at a dangerous rate due to man-made carbon emissions.

For example, Vancouver had a higher record temperature in 1910 (30.6C) than in 2017 (29.5C).

Toronto had a warmer summer in 1852 (32.2C) than in 2017 (31.7C).

The highest temperature in Moncton in 2017 was four degrees cooler than in 1906.

Brandon, Man., had 49 days where the average daily temperature was above 20C in 1936, compared to only 16 in 2017, with a high temperature of 43.3C that year compared to 34.3C in 2017.

McKenna’s Environment Canada is merely following the bad example set by several other institutional climate gatekeepers including NASA, NOAA, and the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia.

NOAA, for example, has frequently been caught adjusting past temperatures downwards and more recent temperatures upwards in order to make “global warming” look more dramatic.

During the Climategate scandal, scientists at the CRU admitted that they had thrown away much of their raw data, leaving only their revised data intact.

Their excuse was that it had been done to “save space”.

As the London Times reported:

Scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

Nobody was fired. And the scientists at CRU were subsequently rewarded with a visit from the Prince of Wales who pointedly congratulated them on their fine work.